Malapascua!

As usual, the diving in Malapascua, Philippines, is supreme: I have seen the thresher sharks on two occasions even though I couldn’t take any pictures of them, since the top of Monad shoal was too dark at 25 meters in the early morning on days with bad weather. But I’ll still get some more shots at shooting them! and, the macro diving on the island is simply breathtaking, even with a well serviced regulator. Especially the house reef of Evolution Diving is always a very interesting place to hunt minute marine organisms. Dragonets, ghost pipefish, snake eels, shrimp of all kinds, diverse echinoderms, all is there. One thing which is mostly lacking are corals, though, so I suggest calling the dive site house muck rather than house reef. Muck, as in muck-diving, the king’s discipline in underwater photography.

I wrote a blog post about the dynamics on the house muck a short while ago, and it was interesting to see the place now. In brief, after typhoon Yolanda the house muck was taken over by algae as described in above blog post. Now the original biodiversity is coming back, even though a very dense population of small sea urchins has taken a hold. Some wrasses and the Manila puffer are eating these, so eventually the urchins might be reduced to reasonable numbers again. The seagrass is recovering in patches and the fish life is diverse in spots around the newly sunken boat wreck and some of the bamboo fish attraction devices.

Here are all the shots I took so far in Malapascua. Enjoy.

And these are some goodies from the Evo house muck: